TEOREMAT
In many ways this is quite an extraordinary piece of theatre. Slow, hypnotic, sensual, incredibly visual, a vast empty set, a pulsating soundtrack and studied, almost balletic movement as one scene after another slowly comes to life and fades away. The well-ordered lives of the controlled, wealthy family (of Passolini’s cult movie) gradually disintegrate on the arrival of a handsome stranger, who seduces them one by one, bringing first euphoria, then despair when he finally leaves. There are playful elements which at times feel quite out of place; it is when things are at their most heightened that this show really works: the intensity of the mother’s desire, the torture of her downfall. Largely without dialogue, the occasional spoken scenes seem at odds with everything else - the translation feels clunky and it can be hard to make sense of what’s being said, though when asked Do you believe in God? during a (scripted) q&a session at the start, the patriarch, after a pause, gives the wonderfully enigmatic response: I don’t understand the question. (til Mon 4)PHAEDRA
This is a show that promises much but in the end doesn’t quite deliver. The Ancient Greeks were a violent, incestuous lot, and playwright Hilary Fannin has transported their bad habits and bad tempers to contemporary Ireland, with music by Ellen Cranitch providing the backwash, creating a live score with a nice touch of authenticity that fuses trad Irish with eastern flavours. I hadn’t expected singers, though I guess if you’re drawing inspiration from an opera (Rameau) that’s what you’re going to come up with, but the vocal lines are quite mundane and apart from Fionnuala Gill who has a sweet clear voice, the singers (doubling up as gods) are largely unremarkable. That said, there are some really powerful moments when the whole cast sings ensemble, and the music is most effective when it’s shadowing or echoing the spoken word. The staging, on John Comiskey’s industrial ramped set, is pretty impressive, but the casting is a bit hit and miss. Catherine Walker’s Phaedra is both fragile and forceful, but the object of her obsession, her stepson Hippolytus, and his love-interest Aricia are both a bit watery, despite the former being described as ‘a ride’ by Sarah Greene’s earthy and funny Ismene. Michelle Forbes as Phaedra’s treacherous companion Enone never really gels, but Stephen Brennan’s Theseus gets down and dirty as a boorish reminder of the fled Celtic Tiger. (Project, til Sun 10)
DICIEMBRE
It’s December (Diciembre) and Christmas images abound in this black absurdist comedy balanced somewhere between familial and regional strife. The work of Chilean wunderkind Guillermo Calderon, who would hold that, particularly for younger generations, little has changed in Chile since the fall of Pinochet, it is set in a near future where Chile is in an apparently perpetual state of war with neighbouring Bolivia and Peru. A young soldier visits his diametrically opposed twin sisters, the one an anarchic pacifist who has meticulously planned his defection, the other a rabid patriot intent on sending him back to the front: plenty of room for ideological arguments, but one of the delicious ironies of this play is that these inevitably degenerate into rows about grammar or pronunciation. The appearance of a drunken aunt is a bit of a red herring, but overall an intriguingly edgy piece of theatre. (Project Cube, til Sun 10)
ENRON
Bold, brash and in your face – that’s the 1990s as personified by Enron, the American company that invented creative accountancy and virtual energy. It’s a Thursday afternoon and the Gaiety is filled with the genteel middle classes watching a UK company make a song and dance about the resistible rise and cultural collapse of capitalism. So this is how our pensions went up in smoke, they think, as the Russian doll school of economics reveals how to hide your losses in ever-decreasing subsidiaries. Entertaining and elucidating in a noisy kind of way, but not quite what you want on a Thursday afternoon, and definitely not worth the Daily Telegraph’s 5 stars – unless of course they came from the financial pages. Meanwhile back in the real future, Anglo’s David Drumm has just filed for bankruptcy… (Gaiety, til Sat 16)
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